We begin today’s roundup with Joan Walsh at The Nation who looks at the Cruz-Fiorina gambit:
OK, let’s get some things straight: Senator Ted Cruz won’t have an actual “running mate,” because he won’t have a presidential candidacy much longer. And if he did, against all odds, get the GOP nomination at a contested convention, he would dump poor Carly Fiorina as fast as you can say “swing state.” Fiorina is no electoral draw: She won exactly one delegate in the GOP primary; she lost her 2010 campaign to be California’s senator, badly; and if Cruz was hoping she might somehow swing California, anyway, that’s seems like bad advance work, because she doesn’t even live in California anymore. Speaking as a recently transplanted Californian myself, she is wildly despised there. Nationwide, her favorable rating is 25 percent. [...]
One big problem with Cruz’s strategy, though, is that there are few female candidates as poorly situated to capture women’s votes as Fiorina. Her failed presidential campaign’s only rationale seemed to be that she could brutalize Clinton politically without being derided as sexist. She then became infamous for her cold-blooded lies about the doctored Planned Parenthood videos, including the morbid and oft-repeated false claim that they depicted infanticide. Sarah Palin was a smarter choice to appeal to women than Fiorina is—and Palin was a disaster.
Jeb Lund at Rolling Stone:
First, no amount of Carly Fiorina attacking Clinton in a woman's voice now erases nearly a quarter century of the relentlessly sexist commentary the GOP has directed at Clinton. Nor can her presence magically silence every chauvinist twit who thinks the one thing conservative hopes are counting on is his zinger. [...]
Second, however, a move like this presupposes that conservative women voters needed a feminine mouthpiece to hate Hillary Clinton, instead of relying on everything they already believe in. If you're a woman member of the party that wants to defund Planned Parenthood, you don't need a woman running against a woman avatar of ideas you oppose to clarify the issue for you.
Third, if Carly Fiorina is an alternative, the question is to what? Ted Cruz hopes that the short answer members in his party will see is, "Donald Trump." But that trick only works if they don't look at the rest of the party. Fiorina's presence on the ticket can't save the GOP from Donald Trump's misogyny when a huge and vocal chunk of the party has been taking political comportment lessons from Rush Limbaugh for a generation.
Catherine Rampell explains why the GOP is losing millennials:
“We win ideas contests,” Ryan declared triumphantly.
With all due respect, Mr. Speaker: No, no you don’t.
At least not among millennials.
The GOP is poised to permanently lose a generation of voters, and not (only) because of its odious and uncommonly disliked presidential front-runner. New survey data suggest that young people have become increasingly averse to just about every plank in today’s creaky Republican Party platform.
Paul Krugman at The New York Times examines how Republicans ended up with Trump as their presumptive nominee:
Both parties make promises to their bases. But while the Democratic establishment more or less tries to make good on those promises, the Republican establishment has essentially been playing bait-and-switch for decades. And voters finally rebelled against the con. [...]
[The Republican] party has historically won elections by appealing to racial enmity and cultural anxiety, but its actual policy agenda is dedicated to serving the interests of the 1 percent, above all through tax cuts for the rich — which even Republican voters don’t support, while they truly loathe elite ideas like privatizing Social Security and Medicare.
What Donald Trump has been doing is telling the base that it can order à la carte. He has, in effect, been telling aggrieved white men that they can feed their anger without being forced to swallow supply-side economics, too. Yes, his actual policy proposals still involve huge tax cuts for the rich, but his supporters don’t know that — and it’s possible that he doesn’t, either. Details aren’t his thing.
And Timothy Egan also looks at the conning of working class Trump supporters:
He “loves the undereducated.” He’s a working-class hero to the angry white masses who flock to his rallies. Of all the parts Trump has been playing, this one is the phoniest.
With Trump, you can be sure of one thing: He will betray those people. We know this because he already has. Wage stagnation is the most glaring symptom of a declining middle class. Trump’s solution? He believes that “wages are too high.”
Meanwhile, over at The Washington Post, Eugene Robinson makes the case for a Clinton-Warren ticket:
As Clinton’s running mate, Warren could erase [Clinton’s Wall Street] potential weakness with the Democratic base. She has spent her Senate career becoming known as the scourge of Wall Street. No political figure is more closely identified with efforts to curb the excesses of the financial system. [...]
Warren also has a compelling personal story of having risen from modest beginnings to become a Harvard professor and then a U.S. senator. The fact that she and Clinton would be the first all-female major party ticket should be irrelevant, but isn’t. To many voters, it would be thrilling.